Five Killer Microsoft Word Tricks

Microsoft Word: I can’t think of another application I’d like to have re-written to meet my needs. I’ll kvetch some more another time. Today, I have five tricks to fire up the way you use Word.

Tabs for Word. Cool!

You know how quickly you got used to opening multiple tabs in browsers? It’s a smart way to quickly move among Web pages; without it, browsing is lots like running applications in DOS.

Office Tab is a freebie that works in 2003 and older versions of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. Double-click on the tab bar to open a new a document in a new tab; double-click a tab to close it. A right-click brings up a useful menu where you can save or close all your documents; the Options menu lets you change the look and color of the tabs.

You can save or close all your docs with one click, or right-click the tab to close

Have multiple tabs any way you’d like in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Access

The program is from a Chinese developer (his name might be wangminbai) and the Baidu.com site is confusing even using Google’s translation. The program, however, is entirely in English. Read the product description, browse through the FAQ, and download the Zipped Word tool.

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PC Annoyances–and a Security Fix

I know you’re not always happy with your PC, so here are three fixes to some of the annoyances you’ve sent to me.

Louder. No, Quieter

The Annoyance: I have lots of MP3s I’ve ripped onto my hard drive from CDs. Nothing seems to play at the same volume level. When I play Copeland’s “Fanfare,” it’s loud enough to make the dog jump, yet all of Dave Brubeck’s music is way too soft.

The Fix: When you use Windows Media Player to burn music into a CD, the trick is to adjust–or normalize–the sound level as you’re burning the MP3s to the CD. Do that from the Burn menu by enabling Apply volume level across tracks on the CD. Normalization doesn’t work in WMP when you’re ripping MP3s from a CD to disk. Unfathomable, I know, but it’s Microsoft’s party. So use FairStars CD Ripper to do the job. The freebie does its job, normalizes the cuts, and handles plenty of file formats, including WAV, MP3, WMA, and more obscure ones, such as APE and VQF.

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Small-Business Security Webinar Wrap-Up: Archived Edition, Attendee Questions

I had a great time conducting a Webinar on small-business security over at Verizon’s Small Business Center last week. If you wanted to attend but missed it, you can check out the one-hour archived version here.

Folks who attended the event asked some smart questions, but time constraints prevented us from responding to all of them. Here are quick answers to a few more of the questions that attendees submitted.

What are your thoughts on Web-based servers such as https: sites vs traditional servers in terms of security? I’d worry less about the fundamental safety of the two approaches and more about the specifics of particular implementations–a Web service provider who does a great job of protecting your data will keep it safer than it would be on a not-very-well-protected traditional server in your company. Of course, there are plenty of horror stories involving companies doing a crummy job of protecting data on the Web. Bottom line: Don’t trust vital data to a Web service provider without asking tough questions about what it does to safeguard data. Also, remember that the fact a service uses https: to log you in doesn’t mean that it’s doing anything to protect your documents once you’re logged in. (Here’s a Google blog post on that issue.)

Is a single firewall sufficient? i.e. Windows, router, virus provider etc? First of all, you definitely shouldn’t run more than one software firewall at a time on a PC; multiple firewalls can conflict with each other. If your router’s the sole source of Internet connectivity for the machines on your network, and it has a solid built-in firewall, and you’ve configured it well, it should be your primary source of protection. It’s a good idea to make sure it’s monitoring outbound communications as well as inbound ones, to defend against malware which sends data from PCs on your network back out over the Internet. And you still might want to run firewalls on local PCs just in case (I do, including on Macs).

Securitywise, what do you think of remote access solutions such as GoToMyPC or LogMeIn? I’ve certainly known IT managers who wince at the very idea of remote control, since it opens up the possibility of users on a network putting their computers on the Internet without permission. Both of the services you mention offer plentiful security features (here’s info on GoToMyPC’s and here are details on LogMeIn’s); I’d fret less about hackers penetrating them and more about staffers getting sloppy with their passwords. And I’d fret less about that than I would about malware that lets hackers install their own pernicious remote-access software on your PCs.

What can we do if we have already blocked Facebook, Twitter, MySpace etc. and employees use backdoor sites that allow them to get through? You can block access to social networks. You can block the anonymous proxies that lets people get to social networks even if you’ve blocked them. But if you’ve got a smart enough geek on your staff, I’m not sure if it’s possible to use technology to absolutely, positively prevent that person from doing stuff on the Web which you don’t want him or her to do. Which is why a significant component of small-business security ultimately boils down to setting policies, making clear what will happen if they’re violated, and finding employees who you can trust.

Six Useful Things You Can Do With Google

You use Google, sure, but if all you’re doing are searches, you’re just scratching the surface. Here are a few things you might not know about Google.

Life Magazine’s Old Photos

You might see it as a time waster, but I love digging through Google’s gazillion historic photos from Life magazine. Google lets you use the photos for personal use, so it’s terrific for grabbing an image when you need something cute in an invitation or newsletter.

Search Me a Special Search

Google has a search site specifically for Linux users and another for those of you who can’t get enough of Microsoft. Check out the rest of Google’s special search sites. If you like poking around with Web tools, Experimental Search gives you five new ways to search, each aimed at tightening and focusing on specific results.

Google Squared is another exciting experimental search tool. Stick in a couple of words, or a short phrase, and watch Google try to create a spreadsheet of results. For instance, try entering California dog parks or earthquake and volcano types.

Alert me!

Google sends me an e-mail every time it sees a new occurrence of “steve bass,” “earthquakes,” and keywords about my various hobbies and interests. If you haven’t tried Google Alerts, you’re missing out on a terrific service.

Thematic Google

I have a Google home page and the color scheme used to be white bread. I just switched to a very cool Jackie Chan theme and amazingly, my productivity soared (wife, please take note). Choose from truckloads of themes (click on Newest and Hottest for more). [Thanks, DolphinWoman.]

Number, Please?

It used to be easy to remember area codes. (“212″ is New York, “312″ Chicago, and “213″ Los Angeles.) That’s history because area codes are added frequently, like every 20 minutes or so. Next time you’re stuck trying to figure out an area code’s location, give it to Google. Just type the three-digit code and you’ll get a top of the search answer.

There’s more: You can track FedEx, UPS, and U.S. postal service shipments just by sticking the tracking number into Google’s search field; do the same with ZIP and area codes, vehicle IDs, patent numbers, airplane registration numbers, and even UPC codes found on products.

Calculate this

You can use Google Calculator to crunch numbers and figure out conversions. Try entering 12*12 and see what happens; you can also run more complex equations, like G*(6e24 kg)/(4000 miles)^2. Google Calculator handles conversions of all types, such as ounces into tablespoons, dollars into euros, or GB to MB.

[This post is excerpted from Steve's TechBite newsletter. If you liked it, head here to sign up--it's delivered on Wednesdays to your inbox, and it's free.]

Four PC Annoyances, Four Quick Fixes

I dedicated my book–PC Annoyances, 2nd Edition: How to Fix the Most Annoying Things About Your Personal Computer–to Bill Gates. Without him, my book wouldn’t be possible or even necessary.

I still get dozens of e-mails each week with gnarly Windows-related annoyances. These are actual problems recently e-mailed to me — and might be some you’ve encountered.
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Save Ink (and Money) When You Print

Are you replacing printer cartridges faster than Citibank is raising credit card interest rates? Aggravating, and no surprise–inkjets have a voracious appetite.

Have a glass of warm milk and relax — I have a few solutions that can make you happy.
The biggest waste of inkjet cartridges is printing in color when good old black and white will do.

I say to you: Turn off the color. Yep, it’s that simple. Unless color is crucial for your document, you’re wasting ink if you output in color. Try this experiment: Print a color page, then print it again in gray scale. To do this, go to Start, Settings, Printers and right-click on the printer’s icon. Go to Properties and find the tab that lets you change from color to gray scale. Save the settings, then print the page again.

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Five Net Tricks to Save You Money

“You’re a bargain hunter,” one of my more polite friends says. My wife’s more to the point: She calls me a cheapskate. I like being frugal, but what do I know? Call me whatever you want (you will anyway), I don’t like paying retail and I’m always looking for a deal, especially when shopping online.

The Internet gives me the chance to comparison shop, see how shipping figures into the price, look over specifications, and feel confident I’ve found the best buy. Here are some of the sites I use.

* You can pick up a decent amount of background info on an assortment of activities and projects at WhatItCosts. Some of it’s fluffy — what it costs to become a stuntman or to buy a Diane Von Furstenberg dress. Other topics are worth a look: buying a hearing aid or contact lenses, hiring a landscape architect, or learning how to fly fish. [Thanks, Mike.]

* The showstopper when I’m shopping online is the cost of shipping. I’ll find something that looks like a bargain, say, a $3 chew bone for Popcorn, TechBite’s HR specialist. When I get to the checkout page, I discover shipping’s $11. I want to smack the site’s owner on the back of the head. That’s why I’ve added FreeShipping to my shopping arsenal. Sure, not everything’s a good match and I often get the same info if I go directly to the site. Yet I got lucky recently when I spotted dog.com’s $5 flat-rate shipping and ended up placing a $25 order. (And yes, prices were actually lower than competitors on the Water Hole water dish I was looking for.)

* I discovered AntiRebate a couple of months ago and now I get its daily RSS feed. AntiRebate finds bargains — coupons, discounts, and deals — that don’t require a rebate. For instance, I spotted a 2GB microSD card for $5, including shipping, and last year I picked up a $10 Office Max gift card for filling out a short, one-minute survey for DHL. The site has mostly high-tech offers, yet I’ve seen occasional glassware, cookware, and furniture deals.

* I hate it when I get to the end of the checkout process and I see an annoying “Enter your Coupon Code” field. So I kill 40 minutes Googling around, searching for a code, one that sometimes doesn’t exist. (Yeah, sure, like you don’t do it? Right.) Try CurrentCodes, a handy spot for looking up, well, the current codes for tons of online stores. Like these other sites, sometimes it’s a terrific resource, other times, as Jon Stewart says, not so much.

* If you clip supermarket coupons, take a look at Shortcuts, MyCoupons, CouponCabin, and CouponMom.

[This post is excerpted from Steve's TechBite newsletter. If you liked it, head here to sign up--it's delivered on Wednesdays to your inbox, and it's free.]

Fix Your Font Hassles, Save Music From YouTube

You have problems, I have answers, and that’s what I’m tackling in this week’s story: Two of your gnarly issues.

I can see you now, quickly composing a message with your long-repressed computing crisis. Don’t start hyperventilating. I gave up answering e-mailed PC troubleshooting questions years ago. However, some computing hassles, aka kvetches, are broad enough to benefit everyone seeing the solution. BTW, if you do write, I’ll definitely read the missive. Worst case, you’ll get my best personalized boilerplate response (an oxymoron if I’ve ever heard one).

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“My #1 Twitter Tip…”: Smart Advice From 36 Twitterers

A major part of the world of Technologizer continues to happen over at Twitter, where I’m @harrymccracken (you can also get a simple feed of all Technologizer stories at @technologizer), and the whole Technologizer conversation keeps on keeping on, in convenient bite-sized chunks. My recent post What I Know About Twitter was a hit here, so I decided to collect more Twitter tips by asking some savvy Twitterers–namely, my friends over there–for their best advice. I tweeted:

And I got tons of good tips in return–all of which you can read after the jump.
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What I Know About Twitter

[NOTE: Here's a post that first appeared in our free T-Week newsletter, which you can subscribe to here.]

I don’t claim to be a Twitter genius. (Even though I was flattered when Jason Hiner of TechRepublic recently ranked me #1 among tech Tweeters.) And I’m pretty sure I’m not addicted to Twitter. (Although there’s no social network I enjoy more or spend more time fooling around with.)

After spending a couple of years Tweeting, however, I do feel like I’ve learned a fair amount about how to have fun with it–especially over the past eight months or so, during which it’s become core to my daily online regimen. Whether you think of Twitter as a low-maintenance Facebook alternative or a form of micro-blogging or a hybrid of chat room and party line or something else–and me, I think it’s unique–it isn’t always instantly obvious how to get the most out of it. So herewith, a few Twitter tips. They’re not gospel–no two people use Twitter exactly the same way–but they work for me. (If you’re a total Twitter beginner, start by reading this good guide to the service’s nuts and bolts.)

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MagicJack: The Aftermath

Oh, my, but you’re a vocal bunch. When you like something, you tell me. Ditto for when you don’t. If you’re new here, read magicJack: The No-Brainer Money Saver.

Here are some responses that landed to my inbox–and a few of my comments.

* Some of you couldn’t believe I had a perfect, landline-quality connection with magicJack. That’s not quite what I said. When it works well, I said, it’s terrific. At times, though, I’ll make a call and the voice quality is dreadful — snapping, popping, and crackling. So I redial. Since I started using MJ, about 75 percent of the time I get good calls on the first try; 25 percent of the time I have to redial. And yes, bad connections and redials are annoying. But in this economy, so was paying AT&T over $300 a year for my extra landline. Now my yearly cost is $20.

* As with all things technological, kids, everyone’s mileage varies. Bad connections could be because of your ISP’s lopsided tubes, your kids downloading music on a networked PC, or the USB 1.0 ports on your ’486.

* MagicJack doesn’t like Canada as well as it does in the United States. That’s obvious because magicJack doesn’t carry any Canadian phone numbers. Using magicJack in Canada means you’re stuck registering it with a U.S. phone number, and your Canadian buddies have to call the U.S. number. But you folks have great medical care, and very few paparazzi, so I guess it’s a trade, eh?

* I had a dozen messages wondering if magicJack steals passwords, sends spam, or kidnaps children. The most notorious of these accusations — read it on BoingBoing– is a year old. It’s all been proven false. Bob Rankin, a trustworthy journalist, wrote about it in his “Magic Jack – Good or Evil?” series: part 1 and part 2.

* In this corner are the lovers of Skype– and there are lots of you. Funny thing, I use Skype to speak to my Web designer in Singapore for free. But I don’t use Skype often because I already have a headset for my phone; I don’t like needing another one– a USB headset — just for Skype. (That may change: I’m testing Jabra’s GN9350e, a cool-sounding, dual connection wireless headset that lets me swap between the PC and my landline. I’ll keep you posted.)

[This post is excerpted from Steve's TechBite newsletter. If you liked it, head here to sign up--it's delivered on Wednesdays to your inbox, and it's free.]

Use Passwords? Read This Article. Now.

The e-mail from PayPal said I’d sent $400 to a gaming firm in Germany. It’s a dopey phishing expedition, I thought, and authentic-looking, for sure, but nothing to worry about.

The trouble was that when I logged on to PayPal, I really did have a $400 withdrawal. It was clear that someone had my password.

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More Cardinal Rules of E-Mail

In last week’s installment of TechBite, I showed you how to stop sending e-mail that no one is going to bother to read. This week I have a bunch more tips that you can use–pay attention now–the very next time you send me a message.

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Get Read: The Cardinal Rules of E-Mail

Want me to ignore your e-mail? Can do. Just leave the subject line blank, stick your entire message into one, long, 300-word sentence, or use cutesy, curlicued fonts I can’t decipher. Oh, yeah, make sure you use a lavender background and neon green type.

Get ready, I have dozens of ways for you to make sure your e-mail is read.

I’m providing these tips as a public service. Ah, heck, that’s not true. The topic’s entirely for me. I’m persnickety about e-mail because I go nuts trying to plow through the 50 or so e-mails I get each day from TechBite subscribers. Too many are loaded with things that make my head hurt and my eyes water.

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Help is On Its Way

I get messages yelling–no, pleading–for help: “My PC has [fill in the blank] and I can’t [fill in another blank].” I read all of them and pluck those with universal appeal for use in the newsletter and upcoming blog. Unfortunately, I can’t personally answer every message. (Hey, it’s not that I don’t love you; it’s that I don’t have the time and wherewithal, a word I don’t often get to use, to research the dozen Help! e-mails I get each day.)

The truth is that fairly often the unique, PC-specific problems that ail you are things I can’t replicate on my PC. And believe it or not, I don’t know everything. Just ask my wife.

So this week, I’ll tell you how I find solutions for common computing woes. With my help, and your perseverance, maybe you’ll learn how to find solutions on your own and, of course, stop haranguing me for answers. (I know, it’s the old learn how-to-fish cop-out.)

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